The second Showdown is complete, and we’re onto the next Syndicate on our list. Let’s make some waves in the criminal underworld.

If I had any criticism of Freelancer mode as it currently exists, it’s the in-game economy that IO is intending to foster basically doesn’t exist.

By completing optional and prestige objectives, we get the currency of this mode, Mercers. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be much of note worth getting with them. Even in this new mode, bringing in a big assault rifle or shotgun to a Hitman map feels like a big mistake. Spending money on them feels like an even bigger one.

Unfortunately, since I have a way of consistently getting silenced weaponry, I also don’t have anything else to spend my money on. It just lingers on the top right of my screen, begging to be spent. If anything, I’ve gotten better at relying on as little as possible aside from one silenced gun and a ton of tools I can find in the home base.

It’s an odd system, and I don’t know if it meshes well with the Hitman mechanics we know and love.

At last, the trio is back together. Nathan, Elena, and Sully. And at last, we’re finally back on the trail of the lost statue of El Dorado.

The hunt continues!

I’m so used to AAA games taking 20+ hours that I’m still a little surprised that we’re almost 80% through the campaign after only 4 hours. At this rate, we’ll be finished next week with time to spare to look over some of the extras and behind-the-scenes footage.

That’s the stuff I love sifting through, so I’m excited for next time!

Our old pal Sully is still alive! But why is he working for the bad guys? Let’s find out!

It’s easy to criticize Naughty Dog for the cinematic quality of their games and how it fails to truly capture what the medium is capable of, but one thing I will give credit to this style is the way it helps the natural chemistry between actors shine through.

Instead of recording their lines in a voice recording booth, the actors are set up in motion capture suits and act out the performance on a stage, where their mannerisms and voice are recorded for use in the game. Since all of the actors, and the writing team, are together in the same room, they have the capacity to work together in a way other more traditional video game recording setups don’t allow. What that does is add a layer of authenticity to the characters that can’t be recreated any other way.

As critical as I can be of their style, I can’t deny that there are strengths to it as well, this being chief among them.

I continued that last campaign off-stream, and sadly it didn’t go well for me. But that’s to be expected of a roguelike. It just means we start over.

Fortunately, I was able to get past the first showdown before I hit Record.

I’ve hit the point in this roguelike where I haven’t beaten a campaign yet, but I feel like I have the skills and tools necessary in order to do that. Part of that was built in with my map knowledge from all the time I’ve spent in the World of Assassination trilogy, but the rest is coming from the many runs I’ve made both on and off stream.

For example, I didn’t know about the guard in the security room of Dubai that always holds a silenced SMG until I realized that guards weren’t being alerted by the gun I stole from him. These days, I try to start off in Dubai if at all possible simply because I want a silenced gun and I know that’s always available.

It’s a feature of the genre, and part of what I love about it.

We’re packing it in. Drake’s done with this adventure, and he wants to go home. I have no doubt that it will be as simple as stealing a boat and running off.

What do you mean we still have hours of the game left!?

I miss the days when we used to cheat like Weapon Select, Infinite Ammo, or Invincibility by beating video games. Looking at the Extras menu here in Uncharted 1 brought that thought back to me.

I remember replaying this game with Eddy’s Golden Gun and the Dragon Sniper, having access to both over the entire adventure. It made going for treasures and beating the game on the hardest difficulty worth doing.

Achievements are nice, but they aren’t the same.

Well, that didn’t go quite as planned. No matter, on to the next round!

As an interesting “side effect” to the way I played Hitman, I never grew terribly well acquainted with non-silenced weaponry. That means that I’m learning how far gun noises travel, and what guards do when alerted by loud gunfire live only now, despite playing missions in this engine since the 2016 Hitman game.

It’s honestly fun to realize even after all this time there’s a whole layer of systems and interactions that I haven’t yet mastered. It’s going to keep me coming back for sure.

Our progress through the fort is going smoothly. Hopefully, we’ll be able to catch up with Elena soon!

I like the minor detail that Nathan Drake is fluent in Indonesian, especially since we’re about to introduce a character in the next batch of episodes that he has a history with. It’s yet another way the writers communicate details about him without having to explicitly spell them out. Whoever this person is, he’s well-traveled and can handle himself in difficult situations as if he has some experience doing so.

And fun fact: When I tried to search “Buka Pintu” to double-check the translation, Uncharted was the first result. I suppose it’s become a minor meme in the Uncharted fandom.

Well, we’ve got our map back, and a lead as to what might have happened to our favorite journalist. The trail is starting to warm back up!

It has admittedly been a very long time since I’ve watched Zero Punctuation, but when Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune came out, Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw made a point in his review of the game that I do think about when I replay it. The vast majority of the people we are killing in the gameplay sections are various non-white minorities.

By no means do I say that with the intention of passing judgment on Naughty Dog specifically, because that was far from uncommon in the mid-to-late 2000s era of game development, especially since the “war on terror” was still firmly in the hearts and minds of Americans back then. It is still a point worth dissecting for how it tells us more about our culture than we’d be comfortable admitting to.

To Naughty Dog’s credit, this is something that gets addressed(?) in later entries, but it’s still a reminder of how much the industry has grown, despite how much more room it has left to grow. We are making progress, even if it’s at a frustratingly slow pace.

Our last run went well, but sometime after the stream ended I continued that run and failed in the attempt. Now, we’re making a fresh start, from the beginning. Let’s hope that this one is more successful.

It’s hard not to notice that Freelancer is appreciably more difficult than a regular run of Hitman, simply because there are so many variables that it’s difficult to control for them. And yet, the core of learning any roguelike is mastering the systems so that we can control the variables. To a large degree, I’m still working on that.

Another aspect of it is that I trying to remember details about each map that have been buried in my mind for quite some time. At some point, I stopped logging in to take on Elusive Targets, having already obtained all the suits I want as rewards from that mode. For that reason, I’m actually far rustier than I assumed I would be, and a lot of what I’m doing is coming from learning the systems again.

Thanks to the power of memes, we successfully got the guards to Buka the Pintu. Let’s find out what awaits behind the Pintu.

We had a very good conversation in the stream chat during this segment about how the way reloading works encourages us to constantly hot-swap to whatever guns happen to be lying from the goons we killed. It’s faster to pick up a new weapon, one that’s always guaranteed to have a full clip, than it is to reload our weapon in hand. So the optimal strategy isn’t to hoard clips, but to constantly scavenge weapons from the ground.

This is why we have to choose whether or not we pick up ammo instead of automatically siphoning it up once we run over it. To some extent, the intent is to mirror what a treasure hunter like Drake might do in that situation. Rather than keep an arsenal of weapons on hand, we’re constantly pilfering our enemies’ arms and improvizing our way through tight spots. It’s also why we’re only allowed to carry one pistol and one long gun on our person at a time. Unlike Ratchet, for example, Drake is no walking armory.

It’s interesting how small decisions like this can have huge impacts on the fundamental gameplay loop.